The federal-state insurance program helps guarantee that kids in low- and middle-income families don't go without important health care. A troubling gap exists between Medicaid's single-payer coverage and the Affordable Care Act's subsidized private plans, and CHIP fills it. Nearly 9 million children in the U.S. live in families that make too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to buy their own insurance. Here in Texas, CHIP covers about 340,000 kids.

This is an area where responsibility falls exclusively on the government. No private sector solution exists for the challenge of uninsured children.

Related

Unless you plan on gutting child labor laws, we can't expect kids to pay a monthly premium. And unless you plan on gutting your heart, we can't expect kids to suffer because of their parents inability to afford insurance.

Without federal support, Texas funds for CHIP will run dry by February 2018, according to estimates by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. At least 10 other states will deplete their funds by the end of the year.

There's no excuse for Congress to delay on passing a quick and clean renewal. Immediate action might even make some voters happy - a rare tack in Washington these days. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found last month that 75 percent of Americans think that reauthorizing CHIP funds should be an "extremely" or "very" important priority. Both the Senate and the House should cancel their upcoming recess - the Senate next week and House the following week - to focus on renewing this important health insurance program.

Nevertheless, some politicians are simply content keeping CHIP on the back burner. U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, R- Dallas, has claimed that CHIP funding is "not dire or urgent."

We're also starting to see congressional committees bicker about paying for the program - a concern rarely raised for military budgets or billionaires' tax cuts.

Children's health deserves better than to be treated as a political football - especially while Texas children are still reeling from Hurricane Harvey.

"These times are doubly troubling: uncertainty at the federal level and the likelihood that more families are going to need the services post-Harvey," Patrick Bresette, the executive director of the Children's Defense Fund–Texas, told the Houston Chronicle editorial board.

Texas families deserve to know whether or not they're going to have to mortgage their homes to maintain treatment for their chronically ill children. ER doctors deserve to know whether they are going to see an uptick in children who are coming for emergency services because they lack basic care. School principals deserve to know whether they're going to have one more societal problem foisted onto their already overburdened shoulders.

Translator

To read this article in one of Houston's most-spoken languages, click on the button below.

While Congress works on fixing its own mistake, we're left asking one key question: Why?

Why did they allow the program to lapse in the first place? Even rank-and-file Republicans don't exactly know what went wrong, one GOP congressional aide told the Texas Tribune.

Did Congress let CHIP funding expire for budgetary reasons? Or political? Was this a well-thought out decision or an oversight?

CHIP enjoyed strong bipartisan support when it was created in 1997 and adopted in Texas in 1999. Children and their importance to our future haven't changed since then. There has got to be some explanation as to why Congress would jeopardize children's health. Can it be that our Congressional leadership has simply lost sight of the importance of investing in better educated and healthier children?

Maybe the answer is obvious: Kids don't vote and don't make campaign donations. And in Washington, that means they don't matter.